


I'm Something Else When I'm With You

by Cinderscream



Series: kat does sledgefu week 2020 [3]
Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: M/M, Minor Character Death, its talked about but again its not graphic, sledge and snafu are just slightly codependent, slight illusions to self harm but nothing graphic, snafu is touch starved, snafu loves his mom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:14:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25572676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinderscream/pseuds/Cinderscream
Summary: Snafu craves touch. Sledge craves Snafu
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton & Eugene Sledge, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Series: kat does sledgefu week 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1860643
Comments: 16
Kudos: 30
Collections: Sledgefu Week 2020





	I'm Something Else When I'm With You

**Author's Note:**

> I call this one: Kat projects their quarantined induced touch starvation on Snafu for 1k words

Snafu isn’t quite sure how to describe the feeling crawling along his skin. It’s, he thinks it’s something like the patter of itchy little ants chewing their way underneath his flesh, making the hairs along his arms prickle, something like the yawing ache of hunger that reverberates in his bones, sets his teeth on edge. Sometimes it aches so badly that it hurts to breathe, it hurts to  _ be _ , and it would be so much easier if it were something so easy as hunger for food because that pain, at least, is one he’s long become accustomed to, finds easier to ignore and easier to satisfy. 

He rakes his blunt fingernails to leave rows of red scratches along his arms, dips them as deep into the skin as they’ll go and tries to imagine that they’re someone else’s hands, that someone else is touching him, gently gliding calloused fingertips along the insides of his wrists. 

It doesn’t work, and Snafu feels bereft, like he he’s struggling for air but none enters his lungs, and the rare times that it does, it’s not enough, slipping in through his nose and exhaling from his mouth before it has a chance to cause any sort of relief, never quite managing to fill his lungs. At night, in the quiet of the camp and curled up in his cot, he rubs his face against the coarse blanket, imagines it’s a person enveloping him, smothering, holding, suffocating, but  _ touching _ , nuzzles into what passes for a pillow and thinks it might almost be a caress against his cheek, a sensation that that gives him the illusion that he is not alone and hollow, Merriell Shelton carved out of the husk that makes up Snafu, that strange, hunched, gnarled creature that everyone seems so hesitant to approach, to look at, and he thinks it might be like being a plant kept away from a window, kept from the watering pot until it’s a shriveled and dying thing, dry and gray. 

Snafu thinks of the last time he was properly held, back when his maman still had warm breath in her and he was still her Little Merry. Her hands would card through his curls and his hands would wind up in the long river of her hair (matching, dark and wild like his own), and he’d be wrapped up in her warmth, soothed with the knowledge that they had each other. Snafu had become too prickly and sharp for anyone else to hold after her death, dagger eyes and snarling teeth forbidding anyone from giving him the comfort he’d so desperately needed after she’d left him (been taken from him) and he knows it’s because he’d been so brittle that if anyone had so much as looked as him, he’d crumble. He'd crumbled regardless, little shards of himself scattered on his kitchen floor where they had once both danced to the old songs of the radio.

He doesn’t know how to stop being sharp now. 

He’s too much dog teeth and thorns, and who’d want to be anywhere near that, let alone touch it? Who in their right mind would want to reach into the tangled ball of brambles just to have their hand mangled to a bloody pulp in their attempt to get close to him? Who would ever have so much patience?

The answer comes in the form of Eugene Sledge. Eugene Sledge, who doesn’t flinch away from his gaze, who comes back for him when he’s stunned and on the dusty battleground, other boys flocking away like startled deer form the hail of bullets and fire, Eugene Sledge and his kind smile and vibrant hair and melted-chocolate eyes. 

Sledge touches him like he’s glass. Somehow, his hands are still soft and the long, slender fingers that trace across his cheeks at night seem so ghostly. It makes Snafu’s heart stutter, that this spectre of a boy wants… him. Of anyone, from pretty girls waiting back home to the boys in their company (and yeah, it makes him bristle with jealousy, fire sparking in his belly fueled on fear of losing that contact), and somehow, Sledge wants Snafu. He doesn’t pretend to understand it, and he doesn’t let himself think on it too long, wary of the circular trap that path of thought would lead him into. 

And it feels so nice to be held again. 

Sledge runs cold, but his hands may well be firebrands from the way Snafu’s skin burns when his thumbs dig into the coiled, tensed muscles of his shoulders, blaze their way down the knobs of his spine and hesitating just above the waistband of his dungarees, opting to splay their warmth onto Snafu’s bony hips, pressing in, possessive. It’s reassuring, in that Sledge is just as much a dragon as he is, hoarding away the treasure of their touch, the scrape of short nails on a scalp, fingers buried in tangles of dark curls or the silk of red that is Eugene’s hair. 

And Snafu knows that he’s a moth, drawn to the warmth and light of Sledge’s flame, knows that one day, he’ll be burned because he wasn’t cautious enough, but it’s impossible to keep his distance now that his bones have stopped singing their hollow melody, the coil of loneliness in his belly unwound and loose. It’s an addiction- Sledge’s touch, that is. Something like nicotine, except that rather than poisoning his lungs, Sledge’s wormed his way in deeper, tangled himself so closely that when it inevitably comes that he wants to leave (because someone like Sledge would never want to stay stuck to someone with Snafu, that’s not how it  _ works _ ), he’ll have to tear himself out, and he’ll take chunks of Snafu with him, the parts of them that have fused together, the pieces of Merriell left hiding under the protective layers of Snafu and he’ll be truly empty, with Sledge leaving a vacancy that he doesn’t think anyone else could ever fill. 

“Go to sleep”, Sledge murmurs, the words a warm puff of breath that send shivers down Snafu’s spine, and when he properly opens his eyes, he finds himself, not in a foxhole, but home, buried under a pile of blankets with Sledge curled around him, an arm curled snuggly around Snafu’s waist, his breath warming the back of Snafu’s neck. 

Snafu blinks the early morning light out of his eyes, his throat feeling tight, a pressure behind his eyes that he vaguely identifies as tears and it’s so odd, he thinks, that he had not cried throughout the war and he had not cried when Sledge decided to stay with him, but that he’s crying now when he feels so  _ full _ , the blanket heavy with the smell of both of them, the texture of his pillow familiar and somehow not. And Sledge, who makes his breath go all ragged. He squeezes his eyes and the tears fall, a noise scraping it’s way up to break the peace of the golden morning. 

Sledge doesn’t say anything more, but he prods him until Snafu turns around and tucks his head under Sledge’s chin, hiding in the safety of his chest, letting himself fuse into him too. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading uwu


End file.
